This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
Oh my god, this is just too funny.“The DDOS is coming from INSIDE the HOUSE!”
My lord. And they can’t/won’t piece 1+1 together? Hanlon’s razor dictates they are indeed idiots.
My guess is that they are severely understaffed. Happens when the new boss is a noob in the industry and fires the people he needs…
In order to quickly fix it they would probably have to roll back the change to require login to view tweets, which would be admitting that it wasn’t caused by “attacks” on Twitter, which Elon won’t do. Rock and a hard place.
you commented 3 times btw
Sorry! kept getting lemmy network error
The self-DDoS truly the height of idiocy. It’s been a good couple of weeks watching billionaires who have never faced consequences fuck around and find out.
Elon was right, firing off many engineers didn’t cause any DDoS attack from outside- as DDoS attacks are now happening from within
I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds
Is spez rich?
Yes. While he loves to talk about how little reddit makes, he doesn’t mention how much reddit pays him for that.
He’s rich not because of his salary (what Reddit pays him). He’s rich because of his equity/ownership in Reddit. But he can only monetize that if there are buyers.
For years this wasn’t a problem because private buyers and banks were happy to buy his shares or lend against them as collateral. However that market has been drying up over the past 18 months.
So he desperately needs to get to an IPO so he, and his Board of Directors and other stockholders, can dump their shares on an unsuspecting retail public market that doesn’t realize that the “profitability” was only achieved by destroying the user base, and that what they’ve actually bought is a ticking time bomb.
I really hope the IPO bombs just to spite all the people, including Spez, that drove Reddit into the ground.
The problem is that if the IPO bombs, it’s the public investors that will lose money, as fuck u/spez and other shareholders will have dumped their steaming pile of shit shares onto the market from the start to reduce their shareholding and cash in.
When people say that, they don’t mean they hope it bombs after the IPO…
They mean they hope It bombs before the sale so Huffman and the others with a stake don’t make much money
Anyone that buys the stock after the IPO would get a lower price.
It would be the Institucional investors that have the opportunity to buy before the share is open in the market. After that is fair game to anyone stupid enough to buy it.
Short Reddit on IPO. Give him a good farewell.
It’s not just spez , there are going to be a LOT of folks in reddit willing to burn it to the ground to create valuation for an IPO. The next Mod blackout need to happen the night before and the day of the IPO.
Nah I’m pretty sure he got some preferential liquidation a few times and is cash rich.
Thank you for making my point. That’s not salary. That’s equity sold in a secondary.
Already has more money than he should have.
Yes, and he would like to graduate into being obscenely rich through a successful IPO.
Compared to musk? No. Not even close tongue same tier. But he’s still a 1%er
He’s valued over $10mil
I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho
You can’t lose something you never had
They never had their minds. They just now have enough money to make that all of our problems… This is why no one deserves billions of dollars. It makes you go megalomaniacle.
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They just don’t want LLMs scrapping their websites
Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with
bureocracystyle and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.For reddit at least, The money from VCs dried up. They have to monetise fast or go broke.
Elon way way way overplayed for Twitter and the company is hemorrhaging money paying the loans he took out to pay for the purchase.
Google in general is in decline. Ad sales are down as the net becomes SEO’d to death. Marketing teams just aren’t willing to pay for Google ads like they used to since the roi isn’t there anymore.
But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn’t just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I’ve dropped them.
I forgot the actual numbers, but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money. They have a massive platform that is user-moderated for free, filled with free user-created content, with third party developers creating solid apps and features, again for free. Reddit should be able to do fuck all and make money
That plus their own app being abysmal. The official Reddit app is a terrible experience without the necessary features of the old ones
In general, i agree with your post, but GOOG is up ~ 30% in the last 6 months. Specific parts of Google may be dwindling but their overall business is thriving right now.
The stock is not the company, that’s important to remember. The PE ratios for tech companies are totally out of whack compared to basically any other company.
Google stock is doing ok in part because they have Bard which means they’re participating in the AI boom. I think that’s going to turn out to be mostly hot air, but in the meantime it’s helping a small number of companies stay afloat
I really hope this the end of an era of milking the users for data and then selling that for ad money. Twitter and Facebook are switching to a subscription model, but I’m not so sure it’s actually going to reduce the amount of data they try to get from everyone.
Twitter successfully sold itself to a private investment firm for over market value. That’s the dream for tech startups and never-made-a-profit digital services.
Anyone still using Twitter is an addict or a boomer, but that’s exactly the audience that Musk wanted to purchase.
The only reason twitter was popular is because you could check it for information. Towns and organizations would post updates there, it drove traffic, eyeballs, ads and revenue. This is the dumbest thing ever, even if he wanted to promote nazi ideology, it’s idiotic because your only preaching to the choir. You cannot convert people when you drive them all away, so even if it wasn’t about money, it’s dumb.
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The world is starting to wise up to the fact that online advertising is nearly 100% fraudulent so they aren’t buying online ads as much.
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
It goes deeper than that.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it’s way less efficient than hitting the API because it’s doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they’re losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven’t been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can’t be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren’t hosting the site itself, otherwise they’d probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they’re so under staffed they probably couldn’t swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It’s just built up incompetence coming to a head.
How is that even possible? By limiting access the load should be lower, there is no way
Much like the case of Reddit, Musk might want to reflect on who actually produces all the content he’s guarding so jealously, and ask himself what’s likely to happen to the value of his site if he makes it difficult for millions of us to write all his content for free
I don’t think this is that complicated. The hypothesis Musk and Spez are pursuing is that right wingers are easier to monetize because they are stupid. They are basically purging the old, liberal web2.0 userbase, under the premise that they are going to build back something which is more friendly to the conservative social media space.
Image Transcription: Twitter Post:
Elon Musk, @elonmusk
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits
- Verified accounts are limited to reaching 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
I am amazed that this transcribing thing went from Reddit to the Fediverse. Good work 👍
Well, that transcribing thing is volunteers, and I brought it with me haha
And thanks!
It seems to be a heavily enforced thing on Mastodon to provide alternate text for images for the same reason, although I’m admittedly bad about it myself. I wonder how well some of those AIs could do, they create pictures from text, so why not the other way around?
Good human
If you’d install the “show karma” user script, you might cause an integer overflow. Immensely good work that you are doing.
Haha, back on reddit I got to about 90k, and a good portion of that was transcribing.
I’m actually kind of glad it doesn’t show it here. I get to be judged by the content of my post, not by my accumulation of upvote points.
This post has over 600 comments atm. Imagine if this comment thread was all you got out of lemmy in a day lol.
I’m a bit confused what you mean by this
If you were to apply Twitter’s new throttling limits to lemmy you wouldn’t be able to view this entire thread (each comment = 1 post in twitter terms).
Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He’d just let Twitter’s hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it’d be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.
A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn’t shake it. “Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him ‘Maybe I am just stupid?’ But then he violently buries the thought.”
“Stupid?” he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. “I’m a genius.”
He remembered how smart he’d felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.
And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer’s catalog.
And then there was Kanye. “Free Kanye!” he’d declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say “Kim Kardashian for president.”
“Stupid?” he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS’d itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.
There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon’s face, as if he’d just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. “Naaaah,” he laughed, slapping the desk.
He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn’t help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.
“Back to the drawing board,” he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.
Remember elon musk isn’t smart
We shouldn’t credit him for Tesla, spacex, etc because it’s the employees that actually put in the effort and contribute
Elon is just a Mr moneybags that thinks he smart because the things he funded have been good ideas when he actually never contributed anything to those ideas
I can’t wait until the companies he’s finding push him out completely
People call him an inventor. He’s not an inventor, he’s an investor. He’s not an engineer. He doesn’t know how to make cars or rockets. He didn’t invent the Tesla and he just plowed money into SpaceX. His brilliant ideas are things like having the Tesla make a fart noise. His experience is in coding and, based on comments of former Twitter engineers, he’s not even very good at that.
He doesn’t even have experience in coding either. He always pretends to but the only degree he has is in business or something.
Of course he’s a fucking business major
Probably wanted to do Computer Science but failed Comp Sci 101./s if it wasn’t obvious
Honestly this is probably more close to reality than anyone wants to admit.
As a former individual who understands the underlying systems, it seems like they botched deployment of a new feature causing issues and cannot figure out how to solve them.
Most of Twitter is and has been in maintenance mode since acquisition (think of 10 man engineering team and 1 left to handle maintenance).
This is why it cracks me up every time when someone is praising Elon for “cutting slack” when firing all those twitter employees. Yes, twitter did not implode immediately. Turns out, people can build software that is stable enough to run in maintenance mode. But good luck dealing with new issues cropping up.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a former individual. What happened? Was it like a Frankenstein thing?
Former individual is just the politically correct way to say dead guy.
Actually, he pissed of Captain Janeway and was erased from the timeline.
Used to be a nice guy before he became a former individual.
I’ve noticed that my batch image downloader works on maybe 40% of all twitter posts, and only 40% of the time (It used to work 100% of the time before Musk arrived). It’s fucking annoying. I think they’re having major API and CDN issues.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
I heard similar; That this was the result of a migration away from Googles storage, which was cut off before they had the replacement fully set up. So they lost a ton of data and are severely limited in what they can display.
This is just what I’ve heard.
That rate limit is insanely low, even for verified. I’m not verified, but I hit the limit in like 10 minutes of very distracted usage.
The hilarity is that these moves are the exact opposite of the so called Public Square he claims Twitter is or should be.
It’s just like how they forcibly remove you from public squares after you’ve passively listened to people for 15 minutes
The quintessential public square experience
Yeah, 600/800 sounds like a lot until you realize that includes all the stuff you’re just scrolling past in your feed or comments, not even clicking on. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even overlooked the fact that ads might count against that cap too. I’m no heavy user but hit that cap in less than 20 minutes of reading people reacting to the news.
Transcription for the blind: Screenshot of a Twitter post from Elon Musk, Twitter handle @elonmusk, that says:
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
1:01 PM Jul 1, 2023 3.6M Views
-Transcription from a human volunteer. Let me know how I can do better.
Thank you for the transcription, human volunteer :)
The sequence of events from Elon Musk acquiring Twitter to now is an incredible journey.
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Elon Musk bought a social media company for tens of billions, attempted to back out of the deal but couldn’t because of his ineptitude by signing away the ability to reneg on the deal.[1](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/technology/twitter-musk-lawsuit-reasons.html)
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Then there was the freedom of speech advocacy from Musk where he ultimately unbanned racists and then he began sharing bigoted Tweets. But it’s only freedom of speech for his bigoted supporters, when authoritarian governments ask Musk to censor people/tweets he abides by their requests.[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/)
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The site becomes inundated with the alt right rife with bigotry.[3](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/)
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The whole verified blue check mark debacle where verification became something you could pay for, with people making fake “official” accounts. For example a fake account impersonating a pharmaceutical company caused their stock to drop abruptly following a joke tweet.[4](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/11/12/fake-eli-lilly-twitter-account-claims-insulin-is-free-stock-falls-43/)
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Twitter engages in mass layoffs and multiple things break on the site. There are also reports that they can’t pay rent in certain locations. Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisors, as they record a 59% reduction in advertising revenue.[5](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sales-musk.html)
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Elon Musk posts tweets seemingly apologizing for some of the changes and says he will follow the will of the people by posting polls for users to vote on policy changes. Musk asks if he should step down, to which the majority vote in favour of his removal. He then goes on a tirade about bots after losing in the poll. He goes on to say that only paid subscribers will be permited to vote in future polls. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.[6](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/20/elon-musk-breaks-silence-after-10-million-twitter-users-vote-for-him-to-step-down)
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The crème de la crème is Elon Musk implementing a new restriction where you have to be logged in to see tweets. Inadvertently DDOSing his own site.
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New York Times - Why Elon Musk Can’t Back Out of Buying Twitter, According to Twitter
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Forbes - Fake Eli Lilly Twitter Account Claims Insulin Is Free, Stock Falls 4.37%
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New York Times - Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue
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The Guardian - Elon Musk breaks silence after 10 million Twitter users vote for him to step down
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Maybe I’m dumb, but this is starting to seem like these Tech CEOs are dumber than we thought.
Why not just make 4000 accounts and have distributed scraping? What are they going to do next? “Unverified Twitter accounts can only be accessed 10 times?”
I don’t think this has anything to do with data scraping. They seem like can’t pay Google server bills and now got into metered connection
They’ve always been dumb. You don’t put smart people in CEO chairs, you put smart people to do the actual work and leave all the decision making to idiots. Hence the results.
The ones who have that position because they provided capital or such really have nothing left to offer. And I bet that actually really bothers these venture capitalists. They have no use other than their money. When they try to show that they do, they prove that they don’t.
Elon Musk don’t make the worst decisions known to man challenge (IMPOSSIBLE) (GONE WRONG)
Social media aim to keep you attached for as long as you can. Twitter does the right opposite
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
Hey I see you’re commenting from lemmy.world, since yesterday I’ve had troubles opening links, viewing posts and images, and posting comments. Are you having the same issues? I wasn’t even able to open this post on my lemmy.world account
https://lemmy.world gained 40%+ users on July 1st alone.
Methinks the servers are melting from #RedditBlackout.
That’s happening all around. I’m actually impressed that Lemmy still works that well. Reddit/Twitter would be in burning ruins if the daily active users multiply by a factor of 20 within a few weeks. And they aren’t run by a bunch of hobbyists doing this in their spare time, like most instances are.
The Future
Mastodon for the win!
That man has got to legitimately be one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever luck his ass into a pile of money.
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
The CEO of Reddit is a huge Musk admirer.
who had two social media companies dying on their bingo board?
They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
Both could have been profitable overnight if they wanted to. Reddit doesn’t need 2000+ employees. It’s a simple forum, led by volunteers. It is definitely possible to run it profitably on ads and volunteer premium services.
Spez is simply a moron. Reddit doesn’t need multiple chat/messaging features. It doesn’t need NFTs. It doesn’t need to be tik tok.
the biggest thing to me, in terms of server load, is that reddit does not need to host videos/images. It’s a link aggregate.
I’m only a layman in this particular field, but I imagine it’s a lot lighter on resources to direct people to sites streaming video than to host and serve it all yourself.
Oh yeah, I completely agree with that. However, don’t forget that setting up the IT infrastructure for such large sites to be performant and scalable takes a ridiculous amount of resources. And people expect snappy, quick websites with the perfect algorithm for constant dopamine shots.
That’s the reason why I think the Fediverse is the future of social media - but it’s still very young and will take a lot more work to be friendly for the masses.
“Extreme levels of data scraping” my ass. This is probably meant to reduce server costs because Elon put a huge hole in this boat and now he does a very loud “look-what-you-made-me-do” scream. And what on earth would “system manipulation” exactly mean? Sounds like some pseudo-profound bullshit.
pseudo-profound bullshit
That sounds like every single public statement he’s ever made.
Most likely attempt to force people to pay if you ask me. Paid users have significantly higher limits according to him and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are not implemented for paying customers. Others have a casually low limit which can be reached easily.
For me, the biggest mistake he made was put the signup wall without an initial reading limit of 1-10 tweets. Tweets are used as citation by journalists in news articles because people use it as an official platform and many journalists use it to report on what’s happening to a fairly large audience of followers. This is only one example where the signup wall ruins it all. You can’t even go in to read a single tweet. However, look at Medium. I despise it on a personal level due to the quality reduction it caused, but at least it only shows the paywall after your 1sth/3rd/10th article. At least it provides a window to your website from the internet. Elon Musk has slain that dragon too now, and all the windows to look through have been boarded up. He has walled himself and all Twitter users in.
